Homesteading, Homeschooling, and Homemaking in the PNW

Canning Fish and Planting Onions

It’s been a busy last couple of days. The 10th was my daughter’s 18th birthday and we celebrated it quietly as one does with a child who is healing from a skull fracture. Or young adult now, I guess. I made pulled pork for her birthday dinner and we had celebratory cupcakes as she wanted both chocolate and vanilla.

Yesterday we transplanted some green onions into the turkey pen gutter. It is planted almost the full length and I’m going to drop some seeds into the part that is still empty.

The trough above it will be filled with dirt today and planted with snow peas for a fall crop. On the other side of the pen the top row will have all the dead plants yanked out of it and then when the husband gets home we are going to have him move it down a level, fill it in with more dirt and plant some radish seeds in there.

Yesterday I got my first green beans. I got 8, but they made a portion when combined with what is the last of the yellow beans. I will stir-fry them tonight with some other veggies for dinner. They were from the transplants that I had bought, not from the seeds that I planted. Those ones won’t be producing for a couple more weeks, I don’t think. I also picked 3 peppers, 4 tomatoes, a batch of kale, and 1 cucumber in the past 2 days. I’ll have a zucchini ready tomorrow or the next day.

I am going to put some nantes carrots in when I pull out the yellow beans. Carrots grow through the winter here if it doesn’t get too bad and these are a short time carrot, so should be easy enough to grow this late. I’ve got one kohlrabi almost ready to pull.

Yesterday I canned 6 pints of salmon and made 2 more quarts of applesauce. I didn’t can the applesauce, I just put it in the fridge for my son to eat as he is on an applesauce binge. And there will be plenty more apples coming. In fact, I probably will need to go collect some more drops today from the yard.

I picked up 23 pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes to can. Well, we’ll eat some of that fresh, but at least 18 pounds will be canned. I opened a jar on the 10th and used them as fried potatoes and they were incredibly good. I am so happy with how that turned out. Plus a quart makes 4 servings of fried potatoes unless you are greedy and want to eat half a jar by yourself. Now I want to can as many jars as possible.

Miss Addy started laying eggs this week.

Her eggs are small compared to the other girls.

You can definitely tell which ones are hers.

One of the things I am thinking about, besides having food for the winter, is having food for December. My husband will have 4 weeks of unpaid time off in December this year and I’d like to not buy anything but milk and possibly cheese during that month. I want to have enough food to live off our pantry during the month. Well, ideally all fall, winter, and spring, but for sure in December when our income is limited. Which I think we will do just fine if I keep up with what I am doing. I am looking at getting half a pig in October, and we have plenty of chicken and rabbit and we have some duck, plus we will be butchering 2 more, which I think will mostly go to ground duck meat because of their age. We’ll butcher a turkey for Christmas. I may pick up some beef roasts and a couple of steaks, maybe to hoard for December, but with ground rabbit we mostly don’t need hamburger. I’ll can a few jars of it to have on hand, though, just in case we want a break from rabbit.

I am also working on freezing peppers and onions. I did two sheets of peppers and two sheets of onions today. I’d like to end up with a total of 20 gallon bags of mixed peppers and onions and 4 or 5 quart bags of diced peppers. A one gallon bag takes one extra large onion and about 3 bell peppers.

It is a lot of work, but it is incredibly satisfying to see my shelves and my freezer filling up and knowing that while I am spending some money now on the stuff I can’t grow enough of, I am still going to see the reward of it in later months when I don’t have to spend much at all on groceries.

I hear you about the stocked pantry – I try to have enough on hand til the following years harvest – I think we’re down to about fifty dollars a month on food purchases at the store. People think I’m crazy when I tell them I just finished canning 60 pints of beets from the garden – but really, after I give some to my mom, that’s only like one jar a week. It’s a long slog, all the canning and freezing and butchering….but there’s no better feeling than going into winter with the shelves and the freezers full. 😊